An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.

Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—

you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response,
or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception.

The men who scorn or dread introspection take their inner states for granted, as an irreducible and irresistible primary, and let their emotions determine their actions.

This means that they choose to act without knowing the context (reality), the causes (motives), and the consequences (goals) of their actions.

The field of extrospection is based on two cardinal questions: “What do I know?” and “How do I know it?”

In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?”
-- Ayn Rand